The power broker : Robert Moses and the fall of New York

by Caro, Robert A

  Moses' use of the word was particularly indefensible. It came in the course of his attempt to link Lehman to inflated milk prices, despite the fact that the Governor had no control over such prices. In the Utica speech, Moses told the audience of dairy farmers, angry over the fact that while the price of milk kept rising, the percentage of the price they received from the middleman dairy interests remained small, that Lehman was also responsible for that. The Governor, he said, was linked to dairy interests—because, he said, Lehman Brothers had "traded in the stock of companies interested in the milk business"—and had "simply lied to the people of the state" when he claimed that he did not control the State Milk Control Board, which set both milk prices and the percentage of those prices paid to farmers. "That was a deliberate, cold-blooded evasion," Moses said. "In fact, it was just a lie. ... He had the authority himself, but lacked the guts to exercise it."

  Moses' accusation was a lie: he said that Lehman controlled two members of the board when in fact the Governor controlled only one, the other two being Republicans removable only by the Legislature. But when Lehman pointed this out, Moses' only answer was to repeat the charge the next evening, saying, "I said that Governor Lehman lied about the milk administration; he did lie about it."

  Lehman's advisers gathered in a hasty strategy conference to decide what to do about the insult. As it turned out, they didn't have to do a thing. Moses' own supporters did it for them.

  General John F. O'Ryan, the respected reformer who, along with Moses, had been blackballed out of the 1933 Fusion nomination for mayor by Sea-bury, had been backing Moses for Governor. Now the General announced that he wasn't backing Moses any longer. "Mr. Moses," he said, "has indicated by his own acts and words his unfitness for the office he seeks." Even the campaign manager for Moses' own running mate, GOP United States senatorial candidate E. Harold Cluett, publicly announced that he would not vote for the head of the GOP ticket. "He is not the type of man qualified for the leadership of the Republican Party," he said. Running mate McGold-rick, Republican and Fusion Party nominee for Comptroller, kept silent publicly but let anyone who asked privately know how he felt. "The thing was terrible," McGoldrick was to say later. "Those savage attacks on Lehman, personal stuff, just wouldn't wash." Upstate newspapers that for generations had supported every Republican candidate for statewide office announced that they couldn't support this one. Most New York City newspapers rushed into print with editorials like one in the World-Telegram which said: "Robert Moses, as was to be expected, has proved a far more aggressive and agile campaigner than the Governor. But aggressiveness cannot in itself inspire confidence. . . . Realities are realities—not to be concealed by curtains of words or by calling Governor Lehman 'weakling' and 'liar.'"

  Moses' only response was to keep calling Lehman a liar, to flail out at the Governor more savagely than ever, and to broaden the arc of his wild swings until he was attacking not only the Governor's advisers but men connected only peripherally or not at all with his administration. Within a matter of days, he had attained a novel—and perhaps unique—distinction: he was the first—and perhaps the only—candidate in the history of New York State on whom a radio network demanded nonstop libel insurance; the Mutual Broadcasting System refused to broadcast any of his speeches unless the Republican campaign committee purchased a policy that covered every word that Moses said on the air.

  Some of Moses' sallies were reminders of the brilliance of the political invective he had displayed in the La Guardia mayoral campaign of 1933— when he himself had not been personally involved. Jim Farley, still bleeding from his dissection by Moses in the mayoral campaign, wandered into the gubernatorial contest with a quiet little statement of support for Lehman and promptly found himself back on Moses' operating table. Noting that Farley was president of a firm which supplied sand and other building materials to contractors, including some who received government contracts, as well as

  being Postmaster General and chief patronage dispenser for the New Deal, Moses dubbed him the "sand, mail and bag man of the national administration" and then shortened the description to: "Jim Farley, the big 'bag man.' "

  But in most of Moses' attacks, brilliance was made the slave of rage. The scalpel was discarded in favor of the bludgeon—and the swings Moses took with the latter weapon were wild indeed. During its final two weeks, his campaign was almost entirely a campaign ad homines, an exercise in wholesale insinuation and vituperation. Seeing his hopes for elective office vanishing, he spewed venom over his opponents—all his opponents, former friends as well as long-time foes, men who were motivated by principle as well as men motivated by politics.

  In speeches broadcast across the state by the libel-insured Mutual network, Moses called Roosevelt's former law partner, Basil O'Connor, a "fixer and a chiseler," Seabury a demagogue with a "messianic complex" and the state's senior United States Senator, Dr. Royal S. Copeland, a former eye surgeon, a "professional mountebank."

  The closest of former friends—men such as Joseph Proskauer and Morris S. Tremaine, State Comptroller under Smith, Roosevelt and Lehman, with whom Moses had worked closely for years—were not immune. Tremaine, he implied, was senile. "I like Morris Tremaine personally," he said. "He is an old chum of mine, but I think he is getting stale at Albany. . . . Morris ought to get away from statistics for a while. I can guarantee to take care of him in one of our steamer chairs at Jones Beach." He accused Nathan Straus, whose integrity was held in almost as much awe as Lehman's, of using his position as head of the State Housing Board to persuade a low-income housing development to purchase his own property for $200,000 more than it was worth. "If Senator Straus made no claim to be anything more than a very slick trader ... I should have a good deal more respect for him. When, however, he pretends to be a philanthropist, civic champion and uplifter, it becomes a little disgusting," Moses said.*

  If he could not find anything about Lehman's associates to attack, he attacked them for alleged misdeeds of their fathers—even if the fathers were dead. "What is Jack Murray doing at the head of Governor Lehman's campaign committee if power connections are taboo in politics?" Moses demanded in one such charge. As the Herald Tribune pointed out, "Mr. Moses did not explain his reference, but it was understood to infer that Mr. Murray's father, the late Thomas E. Murray, was connected with the [Consolidated] Edison Company."

  If there happened to be any truth in this onslaught of innuendo, Moses did not provide any convincing proof of it. Not one of his more serious charges was documented. Their subjects began treating them almost as jokes. When reporters asked Straus for his reply, he would only say: "Bob Moses

  * Straus's friends, who knew that the "slick trader" was so anxious to help provide decent houses for impoverished families that he had once sold a valuable property to the Housing Board for exactly seventy cents per square foot, felt a little disgust themselves.

  will be in the limelight for another ten days and is entitled to all the fun he can get out of it. As one of his oldest friends and the man who sponsored his entire park program in the State Senate, I -wish him all the luck in the world."

  The one victim of Moses' attacks who did reply at length did so in telling fashion. The day after a particularly far-ranging Moses speech, Ed Flynn issued a statement saying, "The emotional instability of this candidate was never better demonstrated than last night, when, without rhyme or reason, he denounced in wholesale lots men who need no defense at my hands. If the campaign were to continue much longer it would reach the point where this candidate would completely satisfy at least himself, if no one else, that he is the only honest and efficient public servant that this state has ever known. Why does he not state publicly the opinion so often privately expressed by him, of his Republican confreres that he now so affectionately takes to his bosom? . . . Because he is now beholden to these members of the 'Old Guard' for his nomination, he does not dare to publicly repeat his real opinion of them."

  Only one of Lehman's key supporters was sp
ared the lash of Moses' tongue or pen. He was Alfred E. Smith.

  Thirty years after the election, in the midst of a discussion about the former Governor with a luncheon guest, a distinguished historian, Moses suddenly began talking about the day he asked Smith to support him against Lehman. The historian relates that Moses said, "I went to see the Governor and I said, 'Governor, you owe this to me. With your backing, I'm going to go ahead and win this thing. You owe it to me.' And you know what he said to me—after I had worked with him all those years? He said, 'Bob, you know I play this game like a regular.'

  "Well, the pain in that man's [Moses'] eyes!" the historian recalls. "Here was a man, the most powerful man in New York State, telling about something that happened thirty years before. And it still really hurt him."

  According to Smith's daughter and confidante, Emily, the former Governor had wanted desperately not to hurt Moses. But he had no choice. Moses might deny in public that he was the candidate of the Old Guard, but Smith knew he was. And the "Old Guard" was not just a phrase to Smith— they were the men who had fought against his efforts to cement into place above the heads of the state's defenseless poor a roof of social welfare legislation that would give them some protection against the cold winds of illness, injury, old age and unemployment. He knew that if not held in check by a Democratic Governor, they would begin tearing down that structure brick by brick. No matter how deep his personal affection for Moses, he couldn't let them do that. And if Smith felt he owed Moses a lot—and he did feel that way—he owed Lehman a lot, too, not only for Lehman's cash backing of his own campaigns but for Lehman's vigilant maintenance of, and attempts to add to, the social welfare structure, for Lehman's continual gracious public reminders that he was only continuing Smith's work, and for the

  considerate requests for advice that had made Smith feel a part of state government again. Smith's personal feelings for Moses were something special, of course, but the former Governor respected Lehman. And he had, after all, played a key role, perhaps the key role, in making Lehman Governor; he couldn't try now, without any good reason, to oust Lehman from the post in which he had helped place him. Most important, as he said to Moses, "I play this game like a regular"; he had done so for forty years—his rage and bitterness at Roosevelt had not yet driven him to the point at which he would later, for the first time in his life, break with the party to which he had given so much of it.

  When Lehman asked Smith to campaign for him, Smith did. But he campaigned only for the Governor, not against Moses, avoiding any personal attack on him. The press, antagonized by Moses, made capital of Smith's presence in Lehman's camp, but Raymond Ingersoll, one of the few old Smith supporters on Moses' side, was able to reply that "Governor Smith has never said a word against Bob Moses and he never will."

  And Moses didn't attack Smith, either. When, moreover, the two men met at a dinner party soon after the end of the campaign, friends who had been apprehensively watching out of the corners of their eyes saw that within minutes they were talking together in as complete a rapport as ever, Moses as respectful and Smith as friendly as in the days before the campaign. "Nothing could disturb that friendship," says the host at that dinner party. "Nothing!" And the proof of how right he was, of course, came with the opening of the Central Park Zoo less than a month after the end of the campaign.

  It wasn't what Moses said that most antagonized voters; it was how he said it. He let his contempt for the public show.

  "As bad as his speeches read," one observer recalls, "they read a lot better than he read them." The problem was not, observers agreed, that Moses was an unimpressive figure on a podium. On the contrary, he was very impressive. Describing one Moses speech, a reporter wrote: "He stepped up to the 'reading desk' a great bulk of a man, leant comfortably forward and began to speak with the clearest voice and the easiest manner in the world." His broad shoulders, heavy chest, jaw and eyebrows, combined with the physical presence, the sense of poise and self-assurance, he emitted, made him exude strength and power. His voice fit in: it was deep and resonant, just nasal enough to sting.

  But if Moses was a powerful figure, he was not a pleasant one. When he was introduced, his smiles as the audience applauded were brief and the look on his face was more one of barely concealed disdain than appreciation. (There was no acknowledgment of the applause.) He generally cut the applause short by stepping abruptly to the "reading desk" and preparing to begin his speech, as if anxious to be done with it so he could depart for some worthwhile activity. As he read his text, he seldom bothered to look up, sometimes going five minutes without a single glance to acknowledge his listeners'

  presence. When the audience interrupted him with applause, he stepped back with a look that indicated nothing so much as boredom—and resumed reading as quickly as possible. "He made no gestures, he did not vary the note of his voice," wrote one reporter. "He gave no hint of oratory or of rhetorical periods. His only emphasis was a loudening of his voice to drive his points home." "He gave the impression that he was way above them," recalls running mate McGoldrick. "He was alienating them all the way through." He looked like nothing so much as a man dining at a poor relation's home, feeling strongly that it was an act of great condescension and kindness on his part to be there—and determined to let all the people present know he felt that way. The only time that pose was modified was when he got caught up in what he was saying. Then the steady loudening of his voice continued until it was very loud indeed. Loud and harsh. His right hand, which had been resolutely kept in his pocket up until then, would come out—and it would begin to make the pounding gesture his aides had learned to dread. Because there was a microphone on the lectern on which he was pounding, the smack of the palm, thudding down to emphasize each point, would be magnified, and as it rang out over the audience harder and harder, faster and faster, an observer could almost begin to see them squirm, not out of boredom but out of uneasiness, in their seats. As Moses stood before them shouting at them and pounding the podium while not bothering to look at them, he was, all too obviously, not appealing to them for their support but lecturing them, telling them in no uncertain terms what he wanted them to do—and letting them know they had better do it.

  The reaction of audiences showed how Moses affected them. Invariably there was more applause at the beginning of a speech than at the end. With each succeeding appearance, the enthusiasm of his audience waned. The number of people who came to hear him fell further and further below the number that had been expected. At a rally in Queens on November i that had been expected to be a high spot of the campaign, only one of every five seats in the Jamaica High School auditorium was occupied.

  Moses' last appearance showed how little remained of the public enthusiasm that had greeted his nomination. That enthusiasm had persuaded his campaign managers to rent the state's largest auditorium, Madison Square Garden, for a climactic rally on the Saturday night before Election Day. So certain had they been of an overflow crowd that to avoid unseemly jams at the entrance they had printed tickets, to be distributed in advance by local GOP organizations, and had announced that no one would be admitted without a ticket, and that the doors would be closed a half hour before the speeches began.

  On the night before the rally, stacks of tickets remained untouched in GOP clubhouses. Despite a frantic last-day effort to persuade loyal Republicans to take them and agree to show up, despite a decision to leave the doors of the Garden open even during the speeches themselves in hopes that passers-by might wander in, far less than half of the Garden's 25,000 seats were filled. The people who were present were so dispirited that when George Everett, a professional cheer and song leader, took the microphone

  at a few minutes past eight to "warm up" the crowd, he asked them why they were so "downhearted."

  When the candidate rose to speak, he saw, looming down on him from the balcony, thousands of empty seats. The arrangements committee had placed a small American flag on each seat on the Garden floor below him to be
waved by its occupant and he saw staring at him a sea of flags rather than a sea of faces.

  And there, in front of the empty seats, spotlighted in the center of the cavernous, half-empty arena, the candidate stood—pounding his palm hard on the lectern, lashing out in a voice loud and angry, almost ranting, the featured performer of a program that, the Times reported, "was marked by more attacks on personalities than any similar meeting in recent political history."

  At the polls, the verdict of the people was even clearer. It was Lehman 2,201,729, Moses 1,393,638. Robert Moses, the candidate "f the party favored by an overwhelming majority of the state's voters, a candidate for whom, the Herald Tribune reported, the GOP waged "the hardest campaign that party has waged for a state ticket in a half dozen years," a candidate who had entered the campaign on the very crest of a wave of favorable publicity that had been ten solid years in building, lost by more than 800,000 votes. His percentage of the votes cast—35 percent—was the smallest percentage polled by a gubernatorial candidate of any major party in the 157-year history of New York State. As George Fearon had predicted, he dragged his party to defeat with him: for the first time in twenty-one years, the GOP lost both houses of the State Legislature. (The GOP won back the Assembly the next year and didn't lose it again for another twenty-nine years;* the year in which Robert Moses headed the Republican ticket was, in other words, the only election in a fifty-year span in which the GOP lost both houses.) He lost upstate communities that no Republican candidate for any office had ever lost before; he even ran behind Lehman in the total upstate vote. (This fact so astonished veteran political reporters that they refused to believe the unofficial Election Night tallies that first revealed it.)

  The Old Guard which had foisted Moses' candidacy upon the GOP was adequately punished. Its influence would remain strong in the party, but county leaders who couldn't afford to let their local candidates be caught in the undertow of the sinking of a poor candidate and who were determined that one as poor as Moses should never again head the ticket, would never let the Old Guard hand-pick another candidate. His candidacy was its Waterloo.